I frequently amaze new colleagues when I show them that deploying an update for our backend application is a sub-second affair. Our pipeline keeps track of what git tag was deployed last, diffs between that tag and the new release, and uploads the files to each of the deployment targets. It takes longer for the pipeline agent to spin up from Cold on a Monday morning, than it does to actually deploy.

The core of the application is just php scripts, and those are either immediately up to date whenever the next call is, or swapped out the next time that component finishes a processing cycle.

Docker containers are nice, but nothing beats the cause of a stack trace being fixed, tested and deployed to the acceptance environment within minutes of it arriving.

This is probably controversial, but i always disliked how the Borg seemed to assimilate for the sake of assimilation? It was sometimes explained as their way of growth or achieving perfection, but that always rang a bit hollow as a motivation.

If I could write a longer term direction, it would be interesting as a quasi-justifiable thing; have the Borg be the boogeyman in the dark of space, until we find out its collective drive to assimilate is a way to insulate itself against some greater evil.

I’ve always liked stories of eldritch horrors lurking in the depths of space, so one way you could do this, is for there to be something lurking in subspace; warp drive weakens the fabric of space holding it back, which explains the Borg using transwarp conduite instead. This horror would be able to easily subvert individual minds to its needs, but the collective acting as a whole could resist it.

A “bad guy” doing bad things for an understandable reason is much more interesting that them just being straight-up evil. So in general I would aim for something like that.

This falls in the category of “looks shitty, but could be pretty good”.

I once had a variation of this with devilled eggs with minced chicken cooked in a broth mixed in. It was fantastic, so meat in devilled eggs could probably work?

I think you know the answer: your copy goes poof. It’s up to you to decide if the convenience is worth it.

Steam’s TOS does cover you a bit on the first part; an unlisted game must still be available for previous purchasers, but the publisher or developer is not obligated to keep it functioning. They aren’t allowed to intentionally sabotage the files on the depot though; steam can and has rolled back changes when a developer tries this.

I’m actually fine with this distinction; most games I buy are Indies anyway, and most can easily be backed up outside of Steam. On top of that, nothing lasts forever, even software. Hardware platforms change, dependencies shift, and over time things break.

We should try to preserve games, and not accept them artificially breaking, but we shouldn’t expect things to last forever, for free, either.

Likewise, no online platform lives forever. I quite like Steam, I think it’s been a positive force for players and developers, and I think it will be around for quite some time. Someday, eventually, it will go away. But you have to trust someone, at some point.

If that is a problem for you, buy from a place that gives you more control, like GOG.

I read a bit of fan fiction ages ago that extrapolated on what would have happened if Anakin had, at the pivotal confrontation with Mace and Palpatine, made the choice to support Mace instead.

I liked the interpretation that it would have still resulted in Luke and Leia, since Padma would still have had the twins, but not in secret, and without force fuckery, would’ve survived childbirth.

In this timeline, it results in a new high republic era, Anakin as a master, raising his children and them being his anchor to the light side. The friction in the story came from the politics of the Council disapproving of his attachment to his family, but it is also politically difficult to kick out the person who just saved their hides.

While the story didn’t touch upon Ahsoka’s fate much, I would have loved to see a timeline where Ahsoka raised a family and her kids hanging out with the Skywalker’s.

That alone has so much potential for storylines; there would still be remnant forces of separatists, rogue troopers, the death star plans being out there, and potentially Maul as well.

I mean, for 10 bucks anything is a decent deal. Those specs are pretty decent for a simple home server. I’m not familiar with HP thin clients, but I assume you can install a Disdro of your choice on it? My big reason to avoid HP is their crap software and warranties, both of which are moot here.

I would say relatively light software like tailscale, pihole and such would be fine. Docker containers might be pushing it, but that depends largely on what containers you want to run, same goes for nginx; by itself the requirements are fairly low, it depends on what you want to run on it.

Jellyfin might be a stretch, and as you alluded to, real-time transcoding is probably out. It strongly depends on the decoding capabilities of that chip and wether it does hardware decoding or if it all happens in software. The latter might be too much for it. If it can handle it though, it might be interesting as a media player hooked up to a TV, rather than acting as a transcoding or DLNA-esque server.

Oh absolutely. The reason isn’t financial, the reason is cruelty. It always is with this shit.

The original Test Drive Unlimited was great, but it rightfully bombed in reviews due to some really bad technical issues. Some of the car characteristics were really bad and off the mark, and the game suffered from an engine issue that was a problem other racing games had solved long ago;

On long slopes, the geometry of the road didn’t curve properly; the angle would have a polygonal jagging issue. This was most likely to shave off performance cost on the 360. Other games had already solved this issue by effectively smoothing angle changes, but TDU did not do anything of the sort. The result was that on hilly terrain cars would constantly bump around and lose traction due to weird unexpected air-time. Some cars were affected far worse than others, particularly super cars had a bad time.

I loved TDU, I loved cruising around in my Shelby Cobra and doing the one-hour tour around the island for decent money.

But the list of flaws is pretty long, and the technical issues made it a nonstarter for anything competitive.

The effect you are describing is “viral load”; the degree to which a virus is present in the body. This is an indicator of how infectious you are. It is especially important for people with HIV to see if they are “safe” or need their medication adjusted.

However, an at-home test will not be a good indicator of this. These have too many variables such as the site that was swabbed, time delays from the various biological functions, how well you used the kit and even variability in the kit itself.

To properly test for viral load, a blood test should be used. I worked with a company that tested for viral load via expelled breath, and while this was a good indicator of infectiousness y/n, and was faster than a PCR, it was not more accurate.

It honestly wasn’t so bad. I played about 80 hours of it, right after launch. In typical Bethesda fashion, I used a few ini tweaks and such to tailor it to my tastes. Mostly fixing the Stealth (which was horribly broken at launch) and balance changes like reducing the bullet spongyness of enemies.

Both are now patched and configurable through the built-in difficulty settings.

I enjoyed my time with it. I went in expecting a space-skyrim with typical Bethesda jank, and that’s exactly what we got.

Hey Op, since you appear to be somewhere in the EU based on your mention of Euro pricing, would you be willing to name and shame the wheelchair manufacturer and/or model?

Without giving too much of my own personal information away, I might be in a position to cause a bit of ruckus for this particular company in terms of bad PR, possibly legislatively. I work for a company that profiles itself on doing this stuff “the right way” (secure practises, not screwing users this way, etc) and we are working on building a list of practises we are hoping to root out EU-Wide with some examples that are clearly exploitative.

I need nothing personally identifiable, just the brand and model, and I can pass it along to the team that can investigate further.